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Resources updated between Monday, August 03, 2015 and Sunday, August 09, 2015

August 8, 2015

"Yesterday I noted that 46 out of 100 Amnesty International's previous tweets as of Wednesday were about Israel.

Interestingly, since I mentioned that, there have been more tweets than usual, none about Israel or Gaza. Apparently Amnesty is starting to realize that their obsession with Israeli actions from a year ago using false data looks bad...

About 10,000 Syrians were killed in the past two months- but Syria was only mentioned four times.

If I would include only tweets from Amnesty itself, and not retweets from others, the numbers would be even more lopsided.

The only other one-year anniversary I saw them tweet was a retweet about the abduction of the Yazidi girls that caused a stir a year ago. But Amnesty's website didn't mark the anniversary. Instead, it launched two separate major anti-Israel projects – Gaza Platform and "Black Friday" accompanied with press events.

Remember that Amnesty recently excluded antisemitism as a topic of their concern because they simply didn't have the resources. But for bashing Israel they can find all the money they want.

The donors to Amnesty should be aware of how their charity dollars are being spent. If they think that Amnesty is working hard to eliminate injustice throughout the world, then they need to ask why Israeli actions from a year ago are so disproportionately targeted compared to every current crisis on the planet.

A Bangladeshi blogger known for his atheist views has been hacked to death by a gang armed with machetes in the capital Dhaka, police say.

Niloy Neel was attacked at his home in the city's Goran area.

He is the fourth secularist blogger to have been killed this year by suspected Islamist militants in Bangladesh.

Imran H Sarkar, head of the Bangladesh Blogger and Activist Network, told the BBC that Mr Neel had been an anti-extremist voice of reason.

"He was the voice against fundamentalism and extremism and was even a voice for minority rights - especially women's rights and the rights of indigenous people," he said.

BBC World Service South Asia editor Charles Haviland says that, like previous victims, Mr Neel was not only secular but atheist and, like two of the others, he was from a Hindu, not a Muslim, background.

All four men killed were on a list of 84 "atheist bloggers" drawn up by Islamic groups in 2013 and widely circulated.

It was originally submitted to the government with the aim of having the bloggers arrested and tried for blasphemy. The groups which wanted bloggers arrested told us they have no knowledge of who is behind the killings.

There is also a more complex backdrop to the killings. Islamic groups label all these bloggers "atheists" - and many did indeed use the internet to criticise those who believe in God.

But in fact, not all the bloggers were atheists. What they did have in common was they were part of a wider, secular movement that took to the streets in protest in 2013.

Bangladesh's murdered bloggers

The BBC's Akbar Hossain in Dhaka says Mr Neel had filed a police report expressing fear for his life, but his complaints had not been not followed up.

Police said about six attackers had tricked their way into Mr Neel's home by saying they were looking to rent a flat.

"Two of them then took him to a room and then slaughtered him there," deputy police commissioner Muntashirul Islam said.

"His wife was in the flat but she was confined to another room."

In May, secular blogger Ananta Bijoy Das was killed by masked men with machetes in Sylhet. He was said to have received death threats from Islamist extremists.

In March, another blogger, Washiqur Rahman, was hacked to death in Dhaka. Blogger Avijit Roy, who courted controversy by championing atheism and also tackling issues such as homosexuality, was killed in Dhaka in February.

Bangladesh is officially secular but critics say the government is indifferent to attacks on bloggers by Islamist militants.

Two people have been arrested, but no-one charged, in connection with this year's killings, our correspondent adds.

The destiny of 230 civilians of the displaced and people of the city of al- Qaryatayn kidnapped by "Islamic State" is still unknown, including dozens of Christians, 45 women, 19 children and 11 families, while hundreds others are missed. The reliable sources informed SOHR that IS kidnaped them according to name lists, and that some of them were arrested Dar Alyan monastery in the city of al- Qaryatayn, where unknown militiamen kidnapped the pontiff Jack Mrad, who is the head of monastery, was kidnapped from the monastery 10 weeks ago.

The clashes between the regime forces and allied militiamen against IS militants are still taking place between the city of al- Qaryatayn and town of Mahin in the southeast of Homs.

The regime forces opened fire after midnight an places in the Seventh Jazira and places in the neighborhood of al- Wa'er, no information about victims.

ISIS fanatics have executed 19 women for refusing to have sex with its fighters, a Kurdish official has said.

He claimed the women were being held hostage in Islamic State's stronghold of Mosul, Iraq, which the terror group seized in June last year.

Meanwhile a UN envoy investigating Islamic State's vile sex trade has said 'girls get peddled like barrels of petrol' and one can be bought by six different men.

She also verified a disturbing ISIS document which suggested the extremists sell the Yazidi and Christian women and children they have abducted, with girls aged just one to nine-years-old fetching the most money.

ISIS stormed the Sinjar district in northern Iraq last year and captured hundreds of women belonging to the Yazidi community, who the Islamists view as heretics.

The sex slaves who somehow escaped Islamic State's clutches have told of how they were forced to marry fighters who physically and sexually abused them.

It is not known whether the 19 women executed - supposedly just a few days ago - were Yazidis or not.

They were put to death because they refused to 'participate in the practice of sexual jihad,' a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Party in Mosul told Iraqi News.

Said Mimousini also claimed issues around money and the distribution of women have caused a rift within ISIS's ranks.

In October, the terror group released a pamphlet which showed how much it charged for the purchase of its female captives.

Its authenticity was debated until April, when the UN's special envoy for sexual violence in conflict confirmed it was genuine during a trip to Iraq.

Zainab Bangura told Bloomberg: 'The girls get peddled like barrels of petrol... One girl can be sold and bought by five or six different men.

'Sometimes these fighters sell the girls back to their families for thousands of dollars of ransom.'

The shocking document described the women it abducted as 'items' and claimed a decrease in demand of 'women and cattle' affected 'Islamic State revenues as well as the funding of mujahideen in the battlefield'.

It then gives the prices of women and children by age, with one to nine-year-olds costing the most - around £110. The older the women, the lower the price.

The pamphlet - published on October 16 - goes on to say: 'Customers are allowed to purchase only three items with the exception of customers from Turkey, Syria and Gulf countries.

The UN envoy has previously said the best looking Yazidi virgins are sent to depraved slave auctions in Islamic State's adopted capital of Raqqa in Syria, where they are stripped naked and sold to the highest bidder.

She said Islamic State, which controls over four million people living inside its territory in Iraq and Syria, is unlike any other terror group.

Bangura added: 'They [ISIS] have a machinery... They have a manual on how you treat these women. They have a marriage bureau which organizes all of these 'marriages' and the sale of women... They have a price list.'

An ISIS video released in November last year appeared to show an ISIS 'sex slave market' where fighters can choose among different Yazidi girls who are priced according to 'desirable' physical features.

Since then, several women who managed to escape their abusive captors have told of the pain and suffering they endured under ISIS rule.

The mullahs' inhuman regime in Iran has sentenced a young man to be blinded.

The cruel and medieval sentence was handed down on Saturday (August 1) to the 27-year-old man only identified by his first name Hamed.

Hamed had told the regime's court that in March 2011, when he was 23 years old, he unintentionally caused an eye injury to another young man in a street fight, according to the official state-run Iran newspaper.

"It was around midnight and I was sitting at home when my mother called me and said that my father had gotten into a car accident. I rushed to the scene to help my dad, but I really didn't intend to injure anyone's eye," Hamed told the regime's court.

Following this sentence, Ms. Farideh Karimi, a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and a human rights activist, said:

"It is deeply regretful that European governments are not protesting such cases of barbarity in Iran. These savage acts which constitute torture are enshrined in the Iranian regime's laws. At least four people were hanged in public in Iran last month. Such public hangings also constitute a form of public torture. When people are urged to go to the scene, everyone who is faced with that sight is also tortured by that barbaric act. One must ask: Why has the EU closed its eyes to these atrocities."

The Iranian regime's judiciary officials have publicly defended limb amputations, eye gouging, and even stoning to death as a very real part of their judicial law.

Mohammad-Javad Larijani, the head of the Iranian regime's 'Human Rights Council', said on April 10, 2014: "The problem is that the West does not understand that Qisas (law of retribution) is different from execution. We are not ashamed of stoning or any of the Islamic decrees."

"No one has the right to tell a judge to avert some sentences because the United Nations gets upset. We should firmly and seriously defend the sentence of stoning."

He has also said: "Retaliation and punishment are beautiful and necessary things. It's a form of protection for the individual and civil rights of the people in a society. The executioner or the person administering the sentence is in fact very much a defender of human rights. One can say that there is humanity in the act of retaliation."

The Iranian regime on Monday amputated the hand and foot of an inmate in a prison in Mashhad, northeast Iran.

The prisoner, only identified as Rahman K., had his right hand and left foot severed by the authorities. A second prisoner is awaiting the same sentence imminently.

On June 28 this year the fundamentalist regime amputated the fingers of two prisoners in the same prison in Mashhad.

Since Hassan Rouhani took office as president of the clerical regime in 2013, more than 1,800 people have been executed and hundreds more have been subjected to degrading and inhumane punishments such as amputation, flogging in public and being paraded in streets.

In May 2015, a high ranking Iranian cleric, who is the representative of the regime's Supreme Leader in Hormozgan province (southern Iran), called for more inhumane punishments of hand amputations to be carried out.

While visiting Mashhad, Ghulam-Ali Naeem Abadi said: "If the hands of a few of those who commit theft in society are cut off, they would serve as examples for others and security will be restored."

"Security would be restored in society by amputating a few fingers; why then are such punishments not being fully implemented?" he asked.

Last December, the United Nations General Assembly slammed the flagrant violations of human rights by the Iranian regime.

The resolution criticized the Iranian regime's use of inhuman punishments, including flogging and amputations.

The UN's 61st resolution on human rights abuses in Iran also censured the mullahs' dictatorship for the rise in executions, public hangings and the execution of juveniles.

The Iranian regime unveiled a terrifying device in 2013 which is uses to chop off fingers. The device that looks like something devised for a grisly horror movie operates as a circular saw that guillotines prisoners' fingers.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) has repeatedly condemned the medieval punishments carried out by the clerical regime in Iran and has called for the referral of the regime's appalling human rights record to the UN Security Council.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has issued an urgent appeal to all states to donate $100 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to cover its funding shortfall. In a statement issued August 4, 2015, the Secretary General called UNRWA 'a pillar of stability,' but failed to note UNRWA's role in perpetuating conflict.

In April 2015, the Secretary General's Board of Inquiry regarding incidents during the 2014 Gaza conflict found that UNRWA schools were used as storage depots for weapons and as sites for launching of rockets towards Israeli citizens. The Board of Inquiry also determined that UNRWA officials turned over weapons to Gaza's local authorities, i.e. Hamas.

Children stand among a crowd of laughing men as depraved Islamic State militants throw a man accused of being gay from the top of a building in northern Iraq.

Shocking new photographs show the man, who is blindfolded and has his hands tied behind his back, pushed off the top of a silo.

It is the latest proof of ISIS' ambition to hunt down and execute anyone they believe is gay.

It is unclear how the man's sexuality was discovered, but a jihadi appears to commentate on the killing using a microphone.

The pictures, tweeted by an ISIS Twitter account, show the victim at the top of the building with three balaclava-clad terrorists before being thrown to his death. His crumpled, motionless body is photographed at the foot of the silo.

The crowd of men and children - some of them smiling and laughing - watch on as the man is brutally murdered in front of them.

The images are just the latest to be released by the terror group. Last month, vile photographs showed a man thought to be gay being thrown to his death in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

And just a few days earlier, pictures of two men being hurled from a building for 'being gay' and then stoned to death were released. It is thought the photographs were taken in Homs, Syria.

In previous months, similar demonstrations of depravity were released by ISIS, which imposes strict Sharia law in the vast swathes of territory it controls, on social media.